The last couple of nights, I’ve dreamed about running, a little way for my unconscious to attempt to guilt-trip me into getting back into my running shoes.  It’s been one thing after another for the last week:  a strained something in my left knee and hip that had me walking funny for a couple of days; a big pile of meetings that required me to be showered and dressed earlier than I usually can if I run first; the muscle spasm; sheer inertia.  The dreams only kicked in once I hit the sheer inertia phase of the cycle, signaling that it’s time to get going again.

My dreams are often like that, embarrassingly obvious little nudges from below telling me that something’s going on that needs attending to.  Like the night not long ago when I went to bed after having drunk a fair bit more than I should have:  I dreamed of drinking glass after glass of water, the best-tasting water I’ve ever had.  Of course I woke up dying of thirst, completely dehydrated.

And let’s not even get into the recurring dream about my inability to find a working bathroom at the MLA.

What I can’t quite tell, though, is if the dreams are intended to wake me up—“Hey, stupid:  you’re thirsty!”; “Come on, lazy slug; don’t you remember how good it feels to run?”—or if, rather, they’re intended to keep me asleep, simulating the satisfaction of whatever need my body has such that my mind can keep dreaming.

It never works with the MLA dream, though; I never can find a toilet that isn’t either occupied, broken, or so repulsive as to be unusable.

At some point, of course, all those bodily demands have to be answered.  I’ll be back on the treadmill tomorrow morning, in more ways than one.

Planned mileage for week: 15

Actual mileage for week: 3

Planned number of run days: 4

Actual number of run days: 1

Long run for week: 3

Aches, pains, complaints: Stupid cold.

The good news is, though, that I’m basically recovered, and that I had a fabulous run this morning.  I’m of course now two weeks behind where I wanted to be with my long run, though, so the schedule’s going to need some retooling.  But I’m back at it, and that’s an improvement.

And in case you’re keeping count:  three and a half more weeks of classes.  And four weeks and five days until I leave on my sabbatical.

Grrrr.

Planned mileage for week: 14

Actual mileage for week: 9

Planned number of run days: 4

Actual number of run days: 3

Long run for week: 3

Aches, pains, complaints: No aches or pains.  Just complaints.  I managed to get myself out of bed the first morning of my conference in plenty of time to go run before the first interview, and so was all kinds of proud of myself.  But two late nights followed that, one when I just couldn’t get to sleep, and one when I stayed up until all hours of the morning talking with a former student, and neither morning was I able to countenance the long run.  And this week is already off to a bad start.  Here’s hoping posting this snaps me out of this missed-run streak.  Because the running has felt fabulous, and has definitely been an attitude improver.  Which is to say that my attitude has gone from so abysmally bad that I’m ready to pick fights in the hallway to just so bad that I’m ready to gripe at the drop of a hat. 

Planned mileage for week: 9

Actual mileage for week: 9

Number of run days: 3

Long run for week: 4

Aches, pains, complaints: None so far, or nothing pressing, in any case.  Getting started again after two months of non-running is a bit tough, and a little hard on the various joints, but not enough so to make me complain, much less quit.  I do have one pretty serious knot in my left shoulder, which is causing a bit of stiffness and an intense ache throughout my neck and upper back, but aside from that, all’s well.  On the positive side, my stress levels are abating, about which, thank god.

This is the official announcement of the return of the running log.  The announcement comes in no small part because I have discovered, much to my dismay, that I have become one of those people who is incapable of doing anything without a specific future goal, and without some potential for public shame to enforce my work toward that goal.

So, the goal:  the Mardi Gras Marathon, February 5, 2006.  It’s a little sooner than I’d ideally like—I could use about five more weeks to train—but you take what you can get.

And while I’m admittedly doing this largely for my own wellbeing—more on which later—this particular marathon has the benefit of forcing me to reach outside myself, to others who need support.  The race organizers have announced that the net proceeds from the marathon will be given to Katrina relief funds.  I will also be fundraising as I train, more information about which will be forthcoming soon.

I’ve just completed what, if my running log is to be believed, is my first run in almost two months.  An easy two miles.  I had to force myself not to go further.  An auspicious start, I think, for the marathon ahead.

I hit the treadmill yesterday for my second post-orthotic run, with much the same results as the first:  overall, the run felt good; no problems whatsoever with the left foot/ankle/leg; minor complaining from the right foot.  So far, so good.  I’m having to discipline myself a bit, though, to keep my mileage super-low, to stop well before I’m tired, and to take plentiful rest days, as I’ve been laid off for quite some time.  It would be awfully easy to add injury to insult right about now.

So I’m keeping myself amused and motivated by playing around with a series of running hacks, little tools designed to track your progress as a runner in different fashions.  Running lends itself quite well both to the obsessive in me (there are many records that can be kept and statistics that can be tracked) and to the part of me that’s always trying to escape obsession, to achieve a more zen-like calm in the midst of chaos, to still the mind and focus on the thump thump thump of the moment.

For the former, my two favorite hacks:  David Hays’s Running Log, a multi-sheet Excel workbook that calculates things that even I never thought of tracking.  This was originally recommended to me by Dave, just as I was beginning training for the LA Marathon, but for whatever reason, I didn’t fiddle with it much at that point.  Somehow it seemed overwhelming to me, almost too much information.  Perhaps the enforced restriction of my running now, however, has opened up space for me to test out what’s available here:  all of the expected distance and pace trackers, of course, but also a weight tracker, a comparison of actual running with planned running, a record of all your races with times and paces and personal bests, a slew of calculators for paces and times and heart rates and more, and charts and graphs galore.

The second, which Joe emailed me about after I posted about my first post-orthotic run, is a hack of Google Maps that creates a pedometer useful for both finding the mileage of completed runs and planning future runs.  From the linked page, click on the “click here if you don’t live in Hoboken” link (unless, of course, you live in Hoboken), use the usual Google Maps double-clicking, dragging, and zooming to zero in on your location, and then click “start recording.” Double-click to set your starting point, and then double-click again at each turn, to mark your course.  “Create permalink” or “tinyURL” will allow you to bookmark the results so that you can return to them or create new courses.

All of this of course has me itching to run—and contemplating future goals…

So just after my last post, I headed out for my first run since getting my orthotics.  It went quite well, overall; I ran two miles of the 2.5 mile course I took, and my left foot (the one with the bad arch) was just ecstatic the whole time.  (The right foot remains a little uncertain about this whole plastic-in-the-shoe thing, but I think it’s adjusting.)

But as I was trekking up one of the main residential boulevards in town, a smallish one of these crossed my path, about twenty yards ahead.  It seemed a little more at home in the neighborhood than I’d have liked, quite frankly, cruising happily down the center of the road.

You haven’t heard much from me about running since the marathon.  Mostly that’s because there hasn’t been any.

Actually, that’s an exaggeration.  I took a week or so off to recover, and then tied the old running shoes back on.  I ran once or twice a week for the next six weeks or so, but finally had to stop entirely.  My left arch, which began griping late in training, and which got seriously bitchy during the marathon itself, escalated its litany of complaint until I could no longer ignore it.  When I first started noticing that I had a left arch, it was because it would begin bothering me around ten miles into a long run; during the marathon, it started hurting around mile seven; finally, it hurt half a mile into a run, which was my signal to quit.

I went to see my primary care physician in late April—and I promise this post will not devolve into a rant on the failures of the U.S. medical system, though there are elements of that contained herein—saying that I thought my arch had fallen, and that I needed orthotics.  She took one look at my foot and diagnosed a fallen arch, referred me to a podiatrist, and sent me on my way.  I called the podiatrist’s office that day, but the first appointment I could get was three weeks later—the day after I was set to leave for three weeks in DC.  So I didn’t get to actually see the podiatrist (half my fault; half theirs) until early June.  But I went, gave them my co-payment, and saw the doctor.  He manipulated my feet, watched me walk around, and told me I needed orthotics.

Here’s the ranty part, though:  at the end of the appointment, he tells me that my insurance company—the same company, remember, who dictated to my primary care physician to whom she could refer me—won’t cover the orthotics if his office makes them.  “They have another lab they’ll want to send you to,” he says.  He’d be happy to go ahead and make them anyhow, though, for $500.  Being in a bit of a tight cash-flow period, though, I decide I’ve got to get the insurance company to pay for them, if they will, so I wait for them to call me with the approval information.  Which they do, pretty speedily in fact, and refer me to an orthopedics lab nearby.  So I have a little mini-rant built up here about why I got referred to someone who wasn’t going to be allowed to do the work, but I’ll let that slide.

I get an appointment with the orthopedics lab on June 21, and get re-diagnosed.  The orthotist who sees me, incidentally, gives me the most severe diagnosis I’ve gotten, telling me that I’ve done significant damage to my feet—and by extension, my ankles, knees, and hips—by failing to address this problem sooner, but he also gives me exercises to do to improve the problem, in addition to the orthotics.  He takes impressions of both my feet, says that the orthotics should be ready in five to seven business days, and that they’ll call to make an appointment when they’ve got them.  Which they did, but they couldn’t get me in to pick them up until today.

But now I’ve got them, big rigid arched pieces of plastic in both my shoes.  The orthotist says I need to break them in carefully, and let my feet adjust to them, so I don’t end up bruising my feet and making the whole thing worse.  And he’s told me that I have to hold off on running until I can wear the orthotics all day, every day, for a week.

But oh boy.  After that, I’m itching to go.

So it’s clearly time to stop thinking about all this pointless, whiny nonsense about my “career,” and whether or not any recent markers of “success” or “failure” indicate that perhaps I’ve made some colossal “miscalculation” about whether I was in fact “meant” to do the thing that I’ve spent the last fourteen years or so of my “life” in preparation to “do,” or whether there exist such “inequities” in our prevailing “social structure” and “institutional climate” that no amount of “talent” or “hard work” on my part could possibly allow me to “achieve” the thing that I’ve been convinced that I “want,” when, in fact, it may well turn out that I just “don’t.”

Enough of that.  There are more important things for us to consider.

Like my toenail.

The nail of the toe that is right next to my big toe, on my right foot.  The nail which I discovered day before yesterday is in an advanced state of toe-abandonment, and is preparing to pull up stakes and light out for the territories.

Despite previous issues here described, I’ve never lost a toenail before, and I’m just not sure what to expect.  Interestingly, the one I’m losing is not the one I expected to lose; this one’s on a whole other foot, and is a normal toenail, as toenails go.  A toenail that has never given me a minute’s trouble.

The toe proper has tended to blister a bit, in recent years, when I run, on the top edge next to my big toe, because I think the big toe overlaps it a bit and rubs in an inappropriate way when I run.  So I’ve dealt with blistering and callusing and general nastiness, but that’s the nature of toes.  I never thought much of it, and just tried to keep after it with the pumice stone, when I could.

Post-marathon, though, once I could bring myself to look at my feet again—something I resisted at first because I wasn’t sure what state the toe I’d had trouble with before was going to be in—I discovered that, in fact, the nail of the bad toe had gone completely black, and there was a bit of blistering, and I thought, here we go, dead toenail walking.  I never expected the other foot to have gotten in on the act, but, in fact, it had.

The usual blister-on-edge-near-big-toe was there.  But the blister extended around over the tip of the toe, in a way I’d never seen before.  I didn’t think much of it at first, assuming that it would reabsorb, as things do, and I’d be able to go on ignoring that toe, as I have pretty much all my life, but for the pumicing.

Instead, the blister grew a bit.  Not much—no elephantiasis of the toe or anything—but just enough that it became uncomfortable.  Shoes were no fun.  So I did the thing one has to do with such a blister, and let me just say that it was nasty.  It turned out that there was a small pool of blood right under the edge of my toenail, but I got it drained out, and all seemed well.

Over spring break, I got a pedicure.  All of my toenails were a lovely red, and my calluses and blisters professionally attended to.

And because of the red, I had no idea anything was amiss, until earlier this week, when I noticed that my toenail just… didn’t look… right.  Like it was at a weird angle or something.  And I reached down to touch it, and it moved.  And the uncanniness of this can only be compared to that feeling of moving your tongue around a tooth, as a kid, and suddenly feeling that tooth’s edge separating from your gums, and knowing that teeth aren’t supposed to do that.

The toenail is about eighty percent detached, at this point.  The last twenty percent is not letting go, and—I say from unfortunate experience—screams like a mofo if you do something like catch it funny on a sock you’re trying to put on.  So the whole thing is band-aided over, until the inevitable separation finally takes place.

From what I can tell, what’s underneath is none too attractive.  This toe is not likely to see the outside of a band-aid for some time.

The stupid bloody toe from before, though, is soldiering on, as ever.  Toenail still black under the red polish, but going nowhere.

And isn’t that just the way of things.

Oh, yeah.  Things that felt perfectly fine 48 hours ago are now whining and complaining.  And my knees look like water balloons.  And I feel as though I could crawl into bed and stay there for a couple of days, given the opportunity.  But other than that, I’m doing pretty well, post-marathon.

I want to say that the race was a great experience, on the whole, but I’m not sure how much of that sense is tied to the fact that it’s over.  I can say with great certainty that somewhere between miles 19 and 23, I had one very clear thought:  “This was a terrible idea.” That began to fade, however, almost as soon as I finished.  It’s not for nothing that Frank Shorter once said “You’re not ready to run another marathon until you’ve forgotten the last one.” I’m not ready to run another one yet, but I’m beginning to see the faintest of glimmerings of the shades of ideas that at some point in the future I might contemplate doing it again.

What follows may be way more information than anyone other than me wants, but it’s here anyhow.

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